What’s The Worst Ever Christmas Number One?

So Matt Cardle is this year’s Christmas Number One. While the John Cage project was a valiant effort, and the campaigns for the original Biffy track and the Corey Taylor single tried their hardest, you don’t get to derail the X Factor freight train more than once. Cowell took a blow with Rage last year, but he wasn’t going down twice.

‘When We Collide’ will be yet another festive flop, one more Christmas single to stuff quickly in the back of music’s closet and pretend didn’t exist. But while Cardle’s spaying of Biffy isn’t exactly the best track we’ve heard all year, it’s not that bad – certainly not compared to some of the other shameful singles we’ve shunted into the top spot. It joins a huge dumping ground of festive garbage, a musical landfill of misshaped, deformed and downright dismal Chrimbo cash-ins.

We’ve had our American intern trawl through the UK’s dirty Christmas laundry for our recent Christmas Number Ones gallery and frankly we feel a bit ashamed. For starters, how do you explain away the existence of this track with a straight face?

Benny Hill – Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)

I mean, where do you even begin? Well, he was this sort of pervert in the 60s and 70s that went around hitting on women and chasing people through fields to the tune of the yakety sax. The what? Er, you know, the yakety sax. It’s kind of like our comic national anthem. Erm, watch this, it should explain everything:

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Mr Blobby – ‘Mr Blobby’

And then of course there was Mr Blobby, the giant pink and yellow blobby thing in a yellow bow tie that was best mates with Noel Edmonds and lived in Crinkley Bottom. What did he do? Well, he sort of fell over things. Here he is, in one of the many, many videos to parody Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted To Love’ with Jeremy Clarkson and some farty noises.

Jimmy Osmond – Long Haired Lover From Liverpool

You know what, forget it. Let’s just settle down to a bit of Jimmy Osmond and a couple of other yuletide clangers. So what do you think’s the worst ever Christmas single? Slade? Rolf Harris? One of these? Or something else?